Quod scripsi, scripsi.

Not an inadvertent one, like the poor social habits discussed earlier, but a carefully-cultivated one. A signature vice, if you will. Coffee, booze, cigars; expensive leather shoes for your or the opposite sex as your taste dictates.

My web traffic just went up.

Why vices? Character, mostly, I suppose — I subscribe to the school of thought that people are more interested in character flaws than character merits (cruel voyeurs that we all are at heart), and I don’t have a lot of faith in an overly-virtuous author’s ability to really get down into the dirty muck of the human soul.

Put it this way — no one can really identify with a really good person, but we can all identify with a really bad one. We might not have made his/her choices but we’ve sure felt the temptation to. And I think it’s healthy for authors to have had that giving-into-temptation experience a time or two.

I’d wrap up with a candid “reveal” moment of my own personal flaw, but frankly I’m a collector at this point. Maybe you’d better tell me which vice you’ve been nurturing like a beloved child, and I’ll try and give you some helpful pointers. Helpful, right?

After all, we should balance our vices with at least a little virtue here and there.

It’s time for me to admit something I never did throughout my school years: sometimes I have trouble reading.

Not understanding text or comprehending literary devices, mind you. God, that English degree had better be good for something! It’s sure useless for finding a job. No, my problems are logistic.

Settling in with a good book is something of an engineering feat in our household. Neither O Best Beloved nor I have an engineering degree (or one in interior design), so we’ve accidentally stacked the deck against ourselves…consider:

We share a one-bedroom apartment. Reading options are basically limited to the large living room or the bedroom.

In a flight of reckless fancy we painted the large living room a lovely but light-devouring turquoise.

The bedroom was engineered with outlets on only two walls, one of them the wall with the bizarrely-placed windows that you can’t put a bed up against.

Our bed, therefore, is wedged in a corner between my dresser and the wall, with no outlet nearer than the wall directly across from it.

O Best Beloved and I are basically incapable of walking on a flat plane in good shoes, so extension cords stretched across public spaces is just disaster.

The living room can be lit with lamps but also contains two furry, heat-seeking limpet mines that will attach themselves to any stationary lap that presents itself.

Add all this up and you have one hell of a delicate operation. “Settling in with a good book” now involves lining up the cup of tea (essential), the kleenex (also essential most of the time, in our plauge-ridden lives), the book, the bookmarks, the cell phone for inevitable interruptions, and possibly a snack of some kind on the coffee table in an accessible-yet-reasonably-cat-proof cluster, with the tallest and solidest items buttressing the smaller, tippy ones.

On the plus side, proper preparations and a couple of clingy cats gives you an excuse to avoid work for hours. “But Sweetie, the cats will be sad if I get up!”

So that is why I have trouble reading. Do you ever struggle with reading? Don’t be afraid to admit it — we all have our little handicaps.

Some of these posts are about writing and some are just about conversations that came up over beers one night; today is more of the latter.

It does tie in reasonably well to yesterday’s post, at least — like names, first words are something that all of us have, and that we sometimes read more meaning into than we should. They’re less useful for a writer to obsess about endlessly in terms of characterization, I grant. But maybe we ought to. Just for example…

My (older) brother’s first word, in the blissful, pressure-free environment of the only child, was apparently a dreamy mumble of “tree!” This is still the sort of thing my brother is likely to stare off into space and mumble happily, depending on his chemical state.

I, on the other hand, inaugurated my verbal era with a firm declaration of “Mine!”, presumably to my brother.

O Best Beloved, always the overachiever, leapt straight into fully-formed ideas with “Go pool!” rather than trying one word at a time like the rest of us.

And my personal favorite will always be a good and dear friend whose grandmother introduced her to shopping therapy at a very young age, and whose first word was “Nordy’s!” (for “Nordstrom’s,” of course). Given that her summer camp had its own yacht (but not a very big one, she assures us), I’d say that one was prophetic too.

So that’s one of those stories that just about everyone has, but aren’t necessarily useful in any sort of creative-writing sense. Oh well. They’re still fun to share, right?

When we were in college together O Best Beloved was convinced that we would name one of our children Verlin Dayglo. Age has mellowed her somewhat, and she’s now settled on two girls named Maria Dolores and Maude Gonne, but suffice it to say that I still don’t turn to her for help when I’m naming characters in a story.

Instead, I obsess endlessly.

I place an almost talismanic faith in character names (and, to an extent, real people’s names, although my black heart is happily too cynical to be one of those people who reads books on what names mean and how yours might have shaped your life because it attracts certain kinds of celestial energy to you, and yes they exist and yes I’ve thought about writing one for easy-but-minimal money).

Does it matter that much? Maybe; maybe not. I have friends who will cheerfully write the majority of a manuscript/story with a blank space or generic placeholder name for their protagonist, left there to be found-and-replaced once a suitable one is decided on, and the idea just gives me the willies. I feel like I wouldn’t really know who my character was without that one-word summary of all his/her traits to tie them all together.

(Pro Tip — if you do use a placeholder name, make sure it is something that doesn’t appear in any other word, whole or in part, because if you do a find-and-replace on, say, “Thor,” you may well find yourself with a manuscript that includes words like “NAMEoughly” and “NAMEoughbred.”)

Assuming that your book talks about horses, but really, why wouldn't it?

I don’t quite know where this fascination comes from. I doubt I would have turned out that much differently if I had been a Jeffrey instead of a Geoffrey, or even a Verlin Dayglo instead of a Geoffrey.

All right, that last might have induced some schoolyard traumas above and beyond what I struggled through.

But it stands that, even if they aren’t laden with Dickensian significance, I want the name to be set in stone before I start writing about a character. It gives me (in full awareness of the pun) a handle on them that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Does it wind up mattering by the end of a manuscript? You tell me. If you’ve ever obsessed over a character name, or if you just picked one at random out of the phone book, let me know — and let me know how it turned out!

But if anyone takes “Verlin Dayglo” without citing it O Best Beloved will be cross.

I don’t use Facebook much. The occasional link to the ol’ blog, a comment here or there on friends’ stuff — Facebook doesn’t have much to go off of. I’m a mystery wrapped in an enigma and slathered with sweet-n-tangy conspiracy sauce. (My metaphors suffer when I’m hungry.) It’s safe to say that their “targeted” advertising is still firing rangefinder shots at this point.

For example, while I do like opera (which I might have told it at some antediluvian point in the profile creation process), I have never even been to Texas.

So the Dallas Opera ads, not so much. “Lives in Madison, WI” is right at the top of my page, so I dunno how it got to this one. But anyway. The point is that I was not considering how little Facebook knows about me when I posted two completely unrelated links in a disastrous row.

The first was this helpful chart of traditional Biblical marriages, for those interested in preserving them:

And then Facebook suggested that I might like to meet “single men in Madison, WI.” True story. Nice to know it figured out where I live, at least, right?

But for all of you worrying about my domestic happiness, rest assured — O Best Beloved is still with me and still has all her lady-bits (I know; I just checked to be sure). This has just been a useful lesson in thinking carefully about what I put on my Facebook page.

Anyone else inadvertently given the entirely wrong impression of themselves on Facebook? Do your distant friends, the ones that only check your Facebook page but don’t actually know you that well anymore, think you’re queerer than a six dollar bill now? Did I mostly just want to use that phrase ’cause I like it? Discuss!

What’s a Wisconsin Winter Toddy, you might ask? It’s a drink that doesn’t even bother with putting hair on your chest, because if you’ve lived in Wisconsin this long you can already rent yourself out as a bearskin rug in your spare time. This Darwinian drink gets the jump on winter and goes ahead and starts putting hair on your unborn children’s chests instead.

A Wisconsin Winter Toddy needs the following ingredients:

Brandy. Not whisky, or whiskey, or bourbon, or rum, or anything else. Raw fuckin’ brandy. Wisconsin’s love for a drink most people associate with effete Frenchmen seems strange until you realize that we have fantastic grape-growing soil but miserable grape sunlight, resulting in abundant crops of grapes too sugary to make a wine that you don’t distill and age the shit out of. Hence, Brandy Old Fashioneds, Brandy Manhattans, and Brandy Fuckin’ Toddies, served all over the state at road houses so dingy and ancient their blue collar atmosphere has faded to a dirty off-white with hints of old indigo and prominent grease stains.

Honey. Pure honey from bees that fed on sweet Wisconsin meadowflowers, gathered with your own two hands while they swarmed and stung ineffectually at your chest hair and plaid wool jacket. Ideally it should be so crystallized and frozen with age and cold that you have to dig it out with a spoon, but pour it in a spoon even if it’s not. The spoon is important later.

Water, boiled on the stovetop in a kettle or saucepan. If you’ve got a fireplace or a wood-burning stove to set a kettle on so much the better. Don’t even think about microwaving it.

Lemon juice. It lasts for months on ice, so press it fresh in the summer and have a good store laid in for winter. Or just buy it at the store, whatever; we have to cut a corner in here somewhere.

To make your toddy, put the water on the stove and forget about it until it’s boiling and has been that way for a while.

Stick the spoon down into the honey and dig around until it’s mounded up with delicious crystallized goodness. Select a mug based on how drunk you want to get and stick the dripping spoon right into it. It should lean picturesquely against the side of the mug like the long-handled spoon in an old drugstore malt tin and stay there.

Pour brandy directly over the spoon until you’re between a third of the way and halfway up the mug. Don’t be a show-off and pour almost all the way to the top; your drink won’t get enough boiling water to heat up if you do it that way. Just find a bigger mug. Don’t stir yet.

Add a splash of lemon juice. It should be a healthy splash. You’ve got a spoonful of honey in there, remember. You should hear the bottle go “glug” once or twice. Still don’t stir.

Fill the glass the rest of the way with more-than-boiling-hot water. Now you can stir. At this point one of three things happens:

1. You fill too full and stir too hard. The liquid in the center of the mug sinks and the liquid around the edges rises until it pours over, spreading a hot mixture that evaporates and dries into a nigh-indelible film almost immediately all over your countertop. Swear.

2. You pour the boiling water directly onto the handle of the spoon without noticing and grab a brazen hold of metal that’s been flash-heated to 212F. Scream.

3. You do neither of these things. Drink your delicious toddy. Feel like a beast.

Now. Who’s ready to give up on whatever lesser drink they’ve been cradling through the previous long winters of writing (or whatever) and switch to the Badger Country special? Because we all need something to keep our fingers warm by the computer, that’s for sure. Feel free to share your recipes in the comments, if you like!

I like watching numbers go up. Always have. I’m a sucker for addictive little browser games, and my current mission in life is to go back through each level of Angry Birds and make sure I have a higher score than O Best Beloved or my other Google-linked friends.

I don't even LIKE Angry Birds much.

This naturally leads to a bit of a love-hate relationship with the ol’ blog stats page. I can’t help wanting the numbers to go up rather than down, which isn’t the point of this ad-free, not-selling-anything, traffic-really-doesn’t-fucking-matter blog at all and can be kind of a dangerous habit.

Big spikes are the real problem. And they’re the problem for a very silly reason: WordPress just throws everything on a bar graph and sizes proportional to the biggest bar, so a sudden traffic spike changes the scale. All of a sudden your week looks like this:

Those days on the right aren’t bad days. The really really tiny bars that look like such a horrific downturn are still very large numbers. They’re plenty big enough. But in my head the graph looks like this:

(I tried to make that last little face-thingie weep tears of blood too. It didn’t really come out at this scale. But that’s how horrible we’re talking.)

It’s really very silly. So some days my mantra, as I write the next post, runs something like “It’s okay — yours is plenty big. It doesn’t look that different today. Everyone liked it yesterday! Just…get it out there for people to see it.”

And then I feel better, because dick jokes always make me feel better.